Windows XP or Windows 7 Won’t Boot into Safe Mode

Usually when something goes wrong in Windows, we can fix it by restarting the computer and going into Safe Mode, which basically loads the bare essentials that are needed for Windows to run. At this point, you can try to fix whatever issue is causing problems.

However, there are certain times when you can’t even boot into Safe Mode! When that happens in Windows, you know that’s not good. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why Windows won’t boot into Safe Mode.

Reasons can be anything from your mass storage driver becoming corrupted to the hard drive having disk errors to a corrupted registry. In this article, I will try to compile all the resources I have found for fixing this problem.

Method 1 – Recovery Console

The recovery console can be your best friend in situations like this. There are several useful commands in the Recovery Console that might be able to fix the boot problem with Windows XP or Windows 7.

Method 2 – Repair Install

If none of the recovery console commands work, you may have to perform a repair install. A repair install will basically replace all of the Windows system files with new ones from the CD. All Windows updates will be lost too.

However, you will not lose any data or applications. You can read the above-mentioned article, which walks through the steps to perform a repair install.